Building an AWS environment for BC Gateways

Company Overview

Unlike the traded securities world where information is readily available from an exchange, in the disaggregated funds management sector accessing reliable and up-to-date information is a lot less simple or easy. Acquired by the most indirect means, sometimes including screen scraping, transactable data has long been the sector’s Achilles heel.

It was with this insight, and the realisation that blockchain could overcome the limitations of mature technologies to make a cost-effective solution possible, that BC Gateways was established. Its founder had the goal of leveraging blockchain to create a decentralised trust network for the publishing and distribution of information in wealth management.

BC Gateways’ patented approach is to create a ‘Shared Source of Truth’ using a blockchain enabled platform to distribute operational information and documents, such as unit pricing data for investment options, to support essential multi-party processes. This industry leading approach of publishing and subscribing to fund data created strong interest among BC Gateways stakeholders, as long as service integrity could be assured.

The Problem

The BC Gateways team recognised the platform needed to be stable and highly secure, as well as being scalable to align with plans for a global rollout.

Adding to the complexity, there was no time to waste. BC Gateways needed the platform built as soon as possible – the timeframe was weeks, not months. Having confidence in the AWS and Mantel Group team for on time delivery was essential.

With a go live deadline of the end of Q1 2019, BC Gateways began a period of information gathering and internal due diligence on service providers. AWS and AWS Professional Consulting Partner Mantel Group were selected to scope and plan the project to build and engineer an AWS platform for The Gateway service, bake-in security at every level and deliver the robust outcome needed to provide the necessary level of certainty its customers required.

The Solution

The platform architecture is comprised of a hybrid private and public blockchain to create the highest level of data assurance and transaction speeds while preserving confidentiality.

The approach implemented by the team included three main architecture designs which host all the BC Gateways products and act as a platform from which BC Gateways can continue to grow.

These include the client environment architecture with options for a shared client environment providing multi tenancy sharing of infrastructure; a dedicated client environment providing segregation and single tenancy use for those clients with specific requirements; and the central server architecture where the core BC Gateways application and service would be housed.

This approach aligns with the defence-in-depth approach applied by Mantel Group utilising Security Groups, NACLs and routes to protect against security breaches in the public facing tiers from progressing to the private data persistence tiers.

The solution is supported by experienced AWS specialists within the Mantel Group Managed DevOps team. Modern approaches to maintaining operation availability within a secure environment were employed, including heterogeneous logging to support service intelligence monitoring, anomaly detection and SecureCMD, CMD Solutions’ proprietary Automated Continuous Compliance tooling.

The Results

The implementation of the BC Gateways AWS platform by Mantel Group commenced in late February 2019, and was handed over in April 2019, comprising a total day build of less than 30 days.

The most commendable aspect of this project is BC Gateways’ technology-led approach to a novel market offering. The BC Gateways platform is thought to have been one of the first live blockchain environments hosted on AWS in Australia at the time of launch.

Meanwhile, the result speaks for itself. BC Gateways has established a valuable new service for real-time, on-point data sharing, tailored to the financial services industry and differentiated by key AWS technology principles of scalability, security, efficiency and strength.

Services Deployed